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Tesseract dev injects malicious code into browser to illegally DDOS the dbzer0 instance (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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As part of the devs farewell message on their site, they have included malicious code to make each visitor sends 2,000 requests to the dbzer0 servers in an attempt to DDOS and take the instance offline.

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[–] 80 points 2 months ago (24 children)

"Apparently only three people who aren't me actually want a place that's not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate."

I think this is the best part of their message

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  • [–] 62 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    So they wanted to cultivate.. a ddos attack of peace and love?

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  • [–] 20 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    If you take them at their word... yes.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    It also made my browser freeze for a moment when I first found and loaded his page before I blocked all JS from his domain. Not stealthy at all... Many nerd (like most of us lemmy users are) will instantly open devtools when a random page that's supposed to be just text freezes the browser for a second.

    Like, c'mon man, setInterval with even 10 ms of delay would have made the attack both stealthier by not insta-freezing the brower on load, and more efficient by getting way more than 2000 request out of each reader...

    Also, their website seems to be down now :)

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  • [–] 57 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

    My favorite part of this was in the "elephant in the room" post.

    One of his faq questions was something about if the list is a perma-ban. His answer was somewhat incoherent but basically if you stop being toxic you can get off it. But nothing about how. So either he's actively monitoring thousands of accounts that he's also secretly hiding from everyone else, or we were supposed to, I don't know petition him with our last 50 comments to prove we had changed and ask nicely to not be on a list we weren't supposed to know existed in the first place.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    I did not follow this drama, and I don't know about this list everyone is mentioning. Is this something that hides specific users posts and comments from the Tesseract UI ?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Basically, yes.

    Tesseract was downloading at runtime an obfuscated blocklist of users and instances. One that the dev didn't tell anyone about, and didn't give an option to disable/modify.

    db0 was trying to update Tesseract and was unaware that the whole dbzer0 instance was blocked in this way. And because the Tesseract dev is a spherical bastard, rather than saying "this is blocked", it said there was an API mismatch, which sent db0 down a troubleshooting rabbit hole that ended with him blowing the whistle on the whole thing.

    And you can see how mature and wise the developer is for how he responded.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Why are they dropping support for Tesseract after Lemmy 1.0?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    don't want to maintain a solution from a bastard that clearly is untrustworthy.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    If you fork it, the fork doesn't belong to them. You can do what you want with it.

    Besides, if they don't want to maintain it, why don't they stop maintaining it right now? What does Lemmy 1.0 have to do with it?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    just because we found two things he did doesn't mean there aren't other surprises.

    for all we know at this point, he's implemented a backdoor into instances that use it.

    if you're an instance admin using tesseract and you're reading this right now, you should probably drop it asap.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Small point of order, there was an option to disable it, but it was extremely hidden and buried in the advanced settings area and called "enabling toxic mode". Also, this only disabled the runtime policy. There was no way for end users to disable the instance list that was in the source code itself.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    I only learned out about it when someone posted an stl badge of honor to the 3d printing community and during my "what is this even about" investigation found that I was on it.

    But yeah, BSOD summed it up pretty well.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    So that's the piefed dev... and I'll assume the two others consist of the most overtly zionist admins in the FHF corporate team? (Wait, I'm sorry "corpasluts".)

    I mean just what is FHF going to do without their CFO? Or will they keep him onboard as a reliable financial manager who just hates the fediverse?

    Oh it's been a fun the last couple of weeks on here, I can tell you that. The vindication feels great.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Is the piefed dev a baddie too? Boy am I out of the loop

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    I mean, I don't think they've done something this bad just yet but they also do hardcode a lot of things into the software, and some of the webpage blocks are apparently very tedious to take out if you want a politically neutral Piefed instance. They are very openly opposed to the leftists around here. Here is some recent stuff too.

    There was also stuff like the implementation of flairs on Piefed deliberately declining to use ActivityPub endpoints, which made it an exclusive feature to entice users to switch instead of something Lemmy could create compatibility with, which felt kind of EEE-ey to me. Now that was years ago and I haven't kept up on development, they may have changed it around since then. I think flairs are coming in Lemmy 1.0, or something sort of like it.

    And recently there was the whole vote rationing fiasco, which stemmed from some sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how voting works on a place like this by Rimu, was idiotic from the start and ultimately drove PugJesus (an incredibly valuable and active poster in tons of niche communities) permanently off the platform after they didn't back down.

    EDIT: more in this comment thread too: https://piefed.social/comment/12273761

    Piefed has some great features but my opinion of it hasn't been great as of late.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    While I do NOT condone what he did and tried to further his control, I do not think he was all that wrong about places like Lemmy often being a circle jerk of rage and hate. It's the nature of humans to fall into tribes and hate on others that they see as not thinking properly or differently. And places like reddit and lemmy encourage that behavior naturally.

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